Windwalker by Natasha Mostert

Title: Windwalker
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This is the second of Mostert's novels that I've read. I just got through the first, and really liked it, but this one, at least superficially, appeared to me to be almost a carbon copy of the first, with some cosmetic surgery to make it seem fresh and original. I hoped sincerely that it was not like that, and Mostert didn't let me down, but for a while, during the opening chapters, the déjà vu factor was looking like it would reach uncomfortable heights! What was I supposed to think about a novel which begins with the same premise: a damaged girl in a new locale who quickly becomes the target of an anonymous "watcher" (one who has on a previous occasion sat in the dark observing his subject sleeping)? I don’t know from whence Mostert originally pulled up this idea, but it definitely seems to have left a weighty impression on her while leaving me wondering if this novel was more of the same. Rest assured, as I now do, that it wasn't. Phew!

Mostert's title is again in competition as it was with The Midnight Side, but this one has way more competitors. This is an advantage of self-publishing in that you choose your title and you choose your cover. Yes, you don't have the support of an established publisher; you're on your own, but it is all yours, and I'd personally much rather have it that way than to cede creative control to those who have too much power and who do more harm than good in the long run by systematically ignoring talented authors. The only way to break the power of the mega-trending publishers is for all of us writers to stick together and self publish. Put the legacy publishers in the position of having to beg to get authors; then maybe all writers, instead of just a privileged few, will get an even break. And yes, it does bother me that self-publishing giant Amazon is becoming ever more powerful, but that will even out over time as competitors take them on in a battle of business models.

Anyway, Mostert went with Windwalker despite The Windwalker by Tracy Blough, and Windwalkers by R Burns, and Windwalker's Mate by Margaret L Carter, and Windwalker: Starlight & Shadows by Elaine Cunningham, and Where the Windwalk Begins by Todd Dillard, and The Windwalkers by Diane Fanning, and The Shaman Windwalker by Willie "Windwalker" Gibson, and Juno and The Windwalker by Julie Hodgson, or Windwalker by Dinah McCall, and Windwalkers Moon by Randee Redwillow, and Windwalker: The Prophecy Series by Sharon Sala, and Windwalker by Kris Williams, and The Windwalker by Blaine Yorgason! Brave girl is our Natasha!

On the topic of names, the intriguingly-named Justine Callaway, combining both elements of the Marquis de Sade in her first, and a hint of callousness combined with cowardice ('callous-run-away' - or perhaps more charitably, 'called away'?) in her last name is grieving and paradoxically unfeeling. Rather than work through her grief, she chooses the patented Jack Torrance method: flee to a remote location, foolishly hoping that everything will fix itself. She doesn’t, of course, take-up tenure in the horrifically disturbed Overlook Hotel, cut off by a chill Colorado winter as Jack did. Justine moves herself to an isolated country home in her homeland of Britain. Rather than pursue her interest (which unlike Jack, is photography, not writing), she initially spends day after day doing precisely nothing but sit around staring into space. Will we, I found myself wondering, see her churn out image after image of exactly the same subject in parallel with Torrance's "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"? All black and no white makes Justine a crazy girl, maybe?! Amusingly, she does do something disturbingly similar, but not for the same reason.

So our protagonist has lied to the building's owners to get this job. They wanted a married couple after the last caretaker - a young single male who held raves there and charged for admission - so Justine told them she was married and they believed her. The building is huge, old, creaky and dusty, whereas the grounds are huge, fresh and tended. She spends her first week there doing literally nothing. It took a call from her mother to precipitate an idle stroll through the large and empty house, which in turn roused her from her lassitude, but it didn't propel her into doing anything within the purview of care-taking. Instead, she retrieved her Leica camera - the one she uses for photographically exploring new subjects - and she began visiting the empty rooms, taking pictures of whatever grabbed her attention.

Justine (a name I happen to really like, btw) is old school, preferring b&w film photography to digital, and I immediately suspected that this was for the same reason I employed it in Saurus: because Mostert and I both need to have disconcerting things appear as the images are developed before the photographer's eyes. How robbed we've been - even as we make astounding and welcome progress - by the advent digital imagery! The thought did occur to me, given where the author is going with this, that digital images might actually have been a better choice. Assuming for a minute that it's possible for a mind to influence a photograph (it's not! More on this anon) it seems to me it would be a better bet were it to be placed on the mental manipulation of digital images (which, let's face it, exist only in the form of ones and zeroes encoded onto a magnetic or some other medium), than it would to do the same with fixed, printed images.

Mostert mentions (in the context of reading from a textbook on the subject - a very clever ruse to distance oneself from assertions!) the topic of "thoughtography" by which mental images are supposedly directly transferred to photographic film. It seems that the images Justine is discovering in her prints are her own projections. As I mentioned in my previous review, I don't buy any of this nonsense, but it's a great subject to play around with in fiction. When I was younger and more impressionable than I am now, I read a lot of books on topics like this, but the more I read, the more I came to an understanding of how amazingly easy it is to fool humans with woo and whack.

Ted Serios was purportedly a "thoughtographer" and he's mentioned in Windwalker. I read a book written by the scientist (Jule Eisenbud) who studied him, but Eisenbud, whilst ostensibly trying to be skeptical, was rather given to gullibility and conducted his "experiments" on Serios with really, really poor controls. The problem is that scientists are by far the worst people for studying this kind of charlatanry. The best people are magicians and one of the most famous, The Amazing Randi had a long-standing offer to pay one million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate any of these powers under controlled conditions. No one ever claimed it. That tells you all you need to know right there!

James Randi and others exposed Serios as a fraud, Randi demonstrating how easy it was to replicate Serios's "thoughtography" scam, but let's pretend that in this novel, some other magical method is at work so we can enjoy the fiction! So, moving along: it's in the process of taking these pictures that Justine discovers an old wardrobe which is locked. She finds the key and opens it to discover that it’s full of clothes: old, musty and forgotten men's clothing. She wonders why no one removed them, but the explanation is at hand. She starts wearing the jacket, draped over her shoulders and despite its age (an overly large size for her) and its odd smell, it comforts her.

The only other people employed by the house's owners are the gardeners: an older man and his adolescent son. Justine meets them as they arrive for their once-a-week yard work. From them she learns of the tragedy which struck the family whose picture hangs in the house. Apparently family bad boy Adam stabbed his brother Richard to death and then disappeared without a trace. Their father had died of cancer and the mother killed herself after her favorite child's death. The remaining child, now a middle-aged woman named Harriet, hasn’t been near the place in nine years even though she had been the owner it. The house is currently owned by a development corporation who want to turn it into a spa and health retreat to complement the lifestyles of the rich and spoiled. Hence the need for a resident care-taker to keep an eye on the property until building permits, etc., have been put into place, which is taking time because the building is of historic value.

Adam, the purported murderer, seemed to me to be such an obvious candidate for innocence, and also the one with whom Justine will hook-up as this novel progresses. Whether I was right in either eventuality remains for you to discover! Another suspicion I had was that it was Harriet who murdered her brother Richard because, even though he looked angelic in the painting (in counterpoint to the evil which Adam seemed to project), he was molesting his sister. Unfortunately for my charming theory, the very next chapter seemed to confirm the popular story. I can still see a way how a witness could think Adam stabbed his brother, and yet have Adam be innocent as charged, but you'll have to read the novel to find out how far wrong or right I was!

Chapter eight was evil, with Mostert subtly ratcheting up the sphincter factor (and no doubt chortling gleefully to herself as she did so), but the hairs on my skin didn’t become sharply erect until I reached page 77 and went beyond; that's when it started to become truly creepy (even though we knew that something like this was coming: it's a Mostert, after all!). This is when Justine starts taking pictures of the house, but when she develops them, there's an image within several of them which looks remarkably like a wolf. And when she reprints the same pictures, the "wolf" has moved! Yeah like that, with hair standing up, and goosebumps! As if that's not enough, I find that I've become suspicious of all the mirrors in the house. Who's behind them, watching? Or am I too paranoid? I mean why has pretty much all the furniture gone but the mirrors all remain? And whatever became of Adam? Fortunately for me, Justine begins investigating. I love it when that happens!

I mentioned earlier that this novel has some parallels with the previous one I reviewed, but I was thrilled to discover that this one took a decidedly different tack. It turns out that Adam and Justine have matching tattoos even though they've never met. Yes, not tattoo, but tattoos: each of them has two, and the designs, a snake and a wolf, are the same. I like this very much. Justine says she went to the tattoo parlour looking to get a "Union Jack". The name of the British flag is actually 'union flag'; it's only properly referred to as a "jack" when it's flown from a ship. This is a writing problem, isn't it? Do you use the correct form, even though most people - including most Brits - do not, or do you use the form most likely to be spoken by your character, and then have to put up with wise-ass reviewers like me correcting you on it?! What a dilemma! Since the 'jack' version is coming into common use regardless of the flag's location, I guess I need to stop being a wise-ass, huh?

Now let me mention, briefly, the signature Mostert stalker, and then I'm done giving out spoilers in this review! The stalker is a he, and he's definitely creepy, but there is at least four or five possible candidates, two of which are strong, the other two or three weaker. But is the "obvious" one a red-herring or a double red-herring?! Only time will tell!

In conclusion, I recommend this as a worthy read; another winner from Natasha Mostert. Now I'm really looking forward to starting Season of the Witch which was my goal all along! I'd begun to think, as I was entering the down-gradient to the end, that I wouldn't like this novel (Windwalker) as well as I liked The Midnight Side, but as it happened, I liked it better and this was despite some issues I had with the latter half of the novel. The Watcher turns out to be a rather different pot of Pisces from the one in the earlier novel (and from what I'd been expecting), which was most welcome (and I even nailed who it was! Yeay! What a novelty that was: for me to get one right!), and I loved the ending which again wasn't what I expected at all, but which was perfect for the tone set in the rest of the story. That kind of relationship really resonates with me, fictional as it may be!

Where I had some problems was in two areas, and it's hard for me to detail my concerns without posting spoilers that I've chosen not to do! I'll try to give voice these without giving anything more away about this story. The first of my concerns was with regard to the two main characters: Adam, and Justine. I was disappointed in the course that was initially charted for them. I felt that they deserved better than what they got (and I'm not talking about the ending, which was great, but about an earlier event). It seemed like they ought to have had more, that these two deserved something greater, and they were under-served. I'm not saying that I could have done better, but I did feel a bit let-down after all the anticipation. I'm sorry that's vague. Maybe a year or two from now I'll revisit this review and add a bit more at a point where I won't feel like I'm robbing the author of some of her glory if I'm more specific!

In more general terms, the other issue was that the closing sequences were drawn-out for too long for me. I realize that Mostert had spun many threads all of which needed to be tied off neatly, but it just seemed to go on longer than it ought. Again, I risk spoilers because there are elements of this novel which I've left unmentioned, but at one point there was a distinct (and to me inexplicable) lethargy in Adam and Justine's actions. It seemed to me that the obvious course - the one which each eventually took - should not have been delayed at all, let alone for as long as it was. I didn’t get that at all, and I saw no rationale for it, which was one of the reasons I felt that this portrayal was less than stellar.

But these are relatively minor considerations when set against what Mostert does deliver: another fun tale that’s by turns creepy, angering (for the right reasons!), warming, intriguing, and engrossing. Definitely a winner!

Paper Towns by John Green

Title: Paper Towns
Author: John Green
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!

This audio CD was read competently by Dan John Miller.

This novel, unfortunately told from first-person PoV, could be a lot worse, but it was getting there. Miller's narration helps, and the fact that the novel was amusing in parts also helped. The story hinges (and I use that word advisedly) entirely upon spineless Quentin Jacobsen's infatuation with his next-door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman, who turns out to be a complete jerk.

Quentin is in fatuation with Margo, who shows up at his bedroom window one night demanding that he drive her around in his mom's van (he has no car) because she's had her car keys confiscated by her predictable, unadventurous, but also feisty parents, and she has eleven critical things to do that night (so she deludedly believes). The entire repertoire of criticality is inextricably entangled in Margo's juvenile need for revenge against a two-timing boyfriend, and she drags Quentin in on it with her, selfish much-adolescent-about-nothing that she is.

This plan having been more-or-less successfully executed, Quentin finds his life starting to turn around, but even as it does, Margo has disappeared. This isn't the first time she's taken off, and she's always left an impossible-to-follow clue before showing up shortly afterwards of her own accord, no less irresponsible or full of self-importance. This time, it's been six days with no word at all from her, and when Quentin discovers a whole series of cryptic clues, since he has no life and no self-respect, he obsesses on following wherever they lead, in hopes of tracking down Margo, and he starts to slowly come to the conclusion that maybe Margo has taken the biggest trip of all. Or has she?

Disk 6 wouldn't play in the car, so I skipped to disk 7 which turned out to be fine because disk 6 evidently had zero to say. Disk 5 ended with Quentin setting out to follow his last clue and disk 7 began with him arriving at his destination, which begs the question as to what value disk 6 was in the first place! Obviously none. Disk 7 was short and had a really unsatisfactory ending. I didn't like either invertebrate Quentin or Margo at all; in fact I think she's a jerk.

I can't help but wonder why Green insists upon making his female characters jerks. I've read two of his novels (all I am ever going to read, rest assured) and in both the female is a loser and a jerk. Is he a misogynist that he does this? Or is it simply that he doesn't know any better? Actually, the question which interests me more is why John Green went out of his way to call me a liar? Indeed, he called every one of us self-publishing/indie authors liars. In a speech which he made to the Association of American Booksellers in 2013 (of which I was unaware until very recently), he stated:

We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul laboring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature...without an editor my first novel, Looking for Alaska, would have been unreadably self-indulgent.
From Brit newspaper The Guardian

In short, John Green thinks we're liars if we say we did it all ourselves (not that your typical indie author ever does this in my experience). Guess what, Green behind the ears? I did it all myself and I know other people did too, and no, I am not lying. The question is why are you so insecure that you need an entourage to write your books? And yes, Looking for Alaska was self-indulgent so you failed and all of your team with you. Deal with it.

Shakespeare's Secret by Elise Broach

Title: Shakespeare's Secret
Author: Elise Broach
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: worthy

At first blush, this appears to be a Shakespeare conspiracy novel! The theory is that Shakespeare's plays were really written by Elizabethan nobleman Edward de Vere. We're offered a limp triad of evidence supposedly supporting this bizarre claim: firstly that Shakespeare wasn’t well-enough educated to have written his plays, having "only" a grammar school education; secondly that when he died he was not eulogized throughout the land as a famous playwright ought to have been, and thirdly, that Shakespeare left no collection of books and manuscripts behind when he died. I can’t believe that Broach uses the utterly absurd argument that Shakespeare used different spellings of his name! That's downright ignorant, especially when she puts it into the mouth of a purported Shakespeare scholar! I'm not a big fan of Shakespeare, so what do I care? Well, I do care about dishonesty purveyed as truth!

The fact that the Oxfordian 'theory' of Shakespeare authorship (which attributes Shakespeare's plays to contemporary Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford) was invented by a guy whose last name was "Looney" should tell you all you need to know about that. The fact that de Vere was evidently such a great author that he could compose twelve of Shakespeare's plays long after his own death in 1604 ought to tell you everything else! The spelling of words (and particularly of names) was not solidified until relatively recently, so the fact that Shakespeare (and everyone else, including de Vere) used variant spellings is meaningless. Strike one leg of this three-legged stool (with the emphasis on stool).

The fact that Shakespeare was grammar-school educated and clearly could write (if he could write his name!) means there is no issue at all with him being technically capable of writing plays. The fact that he was one of the world's best known rip-off artists, copying his plays from earlier works by others, and making a few changes here and there, removes any need for Shakespeare to have been a well-read and well-traveled man, and it also removes any basis for an argument that "a merchant" could not have dreamed up the ideas. Strike leg two. Shakespeare was revered in his own time, but not throughout the country, and not in all circles. It was only posthumously that his name has become so famous and so widely known, so it’s hardly surprising that there was no national outbreak of mourning upon his death. Thus the entire stool crashes down.

But let’s focus on the novel. Hero Netherfield and her family, including older sister Beatrice, are in Maryland - a new state, a new town, and a new school starting in the morning. Why they left their move to the last minute isn’t explained. They’ve moved into a house which supposedly has a diamond hidden somewhere on the property. Beatrice, attending as different school to hero, easily adapts to new places and new people. Hero always feels like she's the odd one out. Their parents met in an Eng. Lit. class and found a common language, and whilst each member of her family seems to have found a source of contentment, Hero has yet to find hers.

Hero is a twelve-year-old who is your standard YA (in this case pre YA, but it's all the same) female: disaffected young girl, moved to a new town, starting at a new school, doesn't fit in, she's plain yet the hottest guy in school falls for her, everyone makes fun of her, mean girls are nasty to her. On short it's the saddest collection of pathetic tropes imaginable - and it's too young for me! So why the interest? Well, I haven't reviewed anything with a Shakespeare element yet in this blog, and this novel did sound interesting. Plus, bonus: it's not first person PoV! Hurray! Elise Broach actually gets it. Also, Hero is part of an actual family! She's not all alone, or with a step parent, or from an orphanage or a broken home. And Broach can write. The intrigue and drama are a bit forced, but it's acceptable to me, and I'm sure the intended age range would have no trouble with it.

The basic plot consists of Hero's discovery that there is supposedly an old and valuable diamond hidden somewhere on the property she just moved into. Being named after a character in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Hero is awakened to the Elizabethan era, to Shakespeare, and to King Henry's the Eight's first beheaded wife. She has to search the house for the hidden diamond, all there's the whole wondering what Miriam and her new friend Danny are up to. The ending is a bit trite and quite predictable, but for the age group, it'll do!

I had some real issues with the "Shakespeare really didn't write his works" wacko angle that Broach seems to buy into. I'll go into that soon on this blog, but be prepared for a huge amount of bias confirmation in the Broach approach, with liberal lack of any critique of the Oxfordian perspective. There are no real Shakespeare scholars who buy into alternative authorship of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, so that oughta tell ya everything you need to know about Shakespeare conspiracy theory! Broach is also seriously, indeed dishonestly, misleading about the Elizabeth 1 - Catherine Parr - Thomas Seymour scandal. Other than that, the story is a worthy read for the intended age group.

The Revenant of Thraxton Hall by Vaughn Entwistle

Title: The Revenant of Thraxton Hall
Author: Vaughn Entwistle
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not a big fan of novels which take real historical characters and have their way with them. It seems disrespectful, if not misleading or downright insulting, so I must confess up front that I had a problem with that, and it was only because it was Doyle and Wilde that I found myself drawn to this one. Who wouldn't be intrigued by a pairing of Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde?! But given that Holmes is fictional and Wilde is not, then I would certainly consider the next best thing: Holmes's creator, Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, and Wilde. Curiously, Wilde's birth year, 1854, is the same as Holmes's fictional birth year. So this is what was offered, but it did fall a bit flat for me. Doyle seemed altogether too adolescent, and Wilde was nowhere near as entertaining as he ought to have been. It's difficult to see where this can go as a series.

I should confess also that I do not believe in any of the psychic and supernatural nonsense purveyed in this novel. There is no respectable evidence whatsoever that there is any such things as ghosts, life after death, mind-reading, levitation, teleportation, clairvoyance, or any of that flim-flam, and there is much evidence that the people claiming these abilities or experiences are at best misguided and lacking a solid scientific education, and at worst, delusional, lying, or knowingly fraudulent.

Having made that clear, I do like a good supernatural story, but have a hard time finding one. I did like this novel and enjoyed reading it, but I'm not sure it has anywhere to go in terms of becoming a series, especially since there were so many "trifling annoyances" in the text, which I shall delve into shortly. This is a story about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and it takes place immediately after he's killed off Holmes (in tandem with with his arch enemy Professor James Moriarty) at Reichenbach Falls at the end of his story: The Final Problem published in December of 1893. In this fictional account by Entwistle, Doyle wants to move on from these trifling (I love that word!) stories and create something new (in actual fact he wanted to devote more time to his historical fiction), but the reading public hates him for destroying their beloved hero to the point where they're pelting him with rotten fruit and vegetables at one point (which seemed rather excessive and exaggerated to me).

It so happens that Doyle is contacted in a rather mysterious way by someone who is a medium, and who has foreseen her own destruction at a seance to take place in the near future. Doyle is angered by, and dismissive of this encounter. Later, he starts to feel that he was wrong, yet when he revisits the address where he met this woman (very mysteriously in the dark), he discovers no one is there. His friend Oscar Wilde becomes so intrigued by the story that he volunteers to accompany Doyle when he goes to the inaugural meeting of the Society for Psychical Research where this deadly seance is due to take place.

The novel is well written, if a little too modern in general style for what Entwistle seemed like he was trying to do, which is to evoke Doyle's style. Indeed, it reads more like an Agatha Christie or a Charles Dickens novel than a Holmes mystery. The Victorian influence in some areas of the novel seemed at odds with the modern influence in others. For example, with the "disguising" of names and addresses. Yes, it was done back then, but given the rather modern tone of the novel, I saw no point in doing it here. Nor did it really disguise the address: 42 _______ Crescent! Victorian London was large, but I'll warrant that there were few "crescents" in it even then, so I found that weak attempt at anonymity to be rather fatuous, and especially given that the blank line was repeated annoyingly often!

There were many other minor issues, such as the curious case of the repetitive repeating! Yes, we know that Wilde has full lips and large hands, and that he smokes Turkish cigarettes! There honestly is no need to lard the text with repeated references to these attributes.

Entwistle purposefully misspells the name of Daniel Home (a well-known "psychic" fraud) - using 'Hume' throughout this novel. The name was pronounced 'Hume', but it was spelled 'Home', and Home himself added the 'Dunglas' in the middle of his name - it was not his name from birth. Contrary to descriptions used in the novel, Home wasn't American (not by birth). He merely resided there, but he was, in fact just as Scots as Doyle. Entwistle owns up to this misspelling in the Author's end note, but I found it rather insulting that this author evidently thinks that his readers are not smart enough to grasp that Home should be pronounced 'Hume' once it's explained. Why not embrace it and have one of the characters mention this at the start? I have to say I disagree with his approach here. And contrary to Entwistle's assertion that Home was never caught faking, he was indeed caught faking on several occasions, and damning evidence of his fraud was discovered in his belongings after his death.

On the topic of names, I don’t get why Entwistle consistently refers to the main male protagonist as Conan Doyle. It’s not an hyphenated name and is the equivalent of referring to Wilde as Wills Wilde, which he does not do. It seems oddly irrational and inconsistent to me. Whilst on the topic of Doyle, I might mention that he was primarily an ophthalmologist, not a family physician as such. Although he obviously did have the training, it's a bit misleading to represent him as a general practitioner, especially since he really never practiced!

Note that contrary to Entwistle's misleading description, moths do not eat clothes or other fabrics. It is the larvae of the moths which do the eating, most specifically the larvae of Tineola bisselliella, and then they eat only natural fibers preferably containing keratin, not synthetic - which of course were in any case scarce in Doyle's era. On this same lack of understanding, Entwistle appears not to grasp that the plural of candelabrum is candelabra - as any writer of that era would have known. While candelabrums is acceptable (odd as it may appear to some of us), I doubt a writer of that era, which Entwistle is evidently trying to emulate, would employ it. He gets further into trouble with this when he employs the singular candelabrum to indicate what is clearly more than one candlestick on p131.

There are also inconsistencies in the novel. The most glaring one, to me, was that Lord Web arrived after we’d been informed that Thraxton Hall had been cut off from outside society by the flooded river, and yet not one person remarks upon this. If the Hall was cut off, then how did Webb get there?

It may seem inappropriate to involve Doyle in the supernatural, given his dedication to resolving mysteries in perfectly mundane and scientific manner through his Holmes character, but the truth is that Doyle was sadly gullible when it came to the psychic charlatans of his era. Indeed it was why Houdini, the scourge of frauds, broke off his friendship with Doyle.

Entwistle is misleading in claiming a big age difference between Henry Sidgwick and his wife Eleanor. They were close to the same age, and both in their early to mid-fifties in 1893, so she was not the young flirt as she's rather shamefully represented here. Indeed, she was dedicated to women's issues, so I found Entwistle's depiction of her to be insulting.

But enough nit-picking. What of the story in general? I found it enjoyable and engrossing, notwithstanding the problems I had with it. I wanted to read it and was interested in what happened, so the author did his job. I was intrigued by the idea that the medium, Lady Thraxton, might have been a ghost. In order to find out, you will have to read the novel! She was definitely a charming and interesting character who was under-used in my opinion, but as appealing as she was, I found myself far more intrigued by another character who played far too small a role in the story, most of it undercover. No spoilers for you there!

So, in short, I found this novel to be a worthy read. It was very easy to get through it, but it seems to me that it will appeal more to they who enjoy Victorian supernatural tales than for they who are fans of Sherlock Holmes or of Oscar Wilde.

Dance of Shadows by Yelena Black

Rating: WARTY!

I have to announce up front that I rated this novel as 'warty'. It was a really great plot idea which was tragically let down by really lousy execution.

There's a Dance of Shadows book trailer here which is quite frankly so pathetic that it ought to be titled Dance of Sad-sack. It's largely in B&W and tells us nothing but how desperately publishers are these days to get attention! Books are not movies and this business of desperately trying to mash-up the two is doomed to failure! Unless someone comes up with something really cool...something out there...something truly adventurous.

Slightly more entertaining is that the hardback edition of this (and perhaps the paperback too, if there is one) has a "BB Live" function attached to it. You can download an app, point your phone at the book's cover, tap the screen, and see a representation of the cover come alive on your device. It's cute, and better than the book trailer, but it's not really that impressive. I have to wonder where they think they can go with this!

Anyway, let's get to the real thing here - the printed word! Red haired Vanessa Adler is a ballet dancing wannabe who has just arrived at the the New York Ballet Academy. It's her first year there, but for Vanessa this is a bittersweet venue. Her sister Margaret, a remarkable ballerina who attended this same school, disappeared without a trace several years before. I skipped the prologue as usual and went right to the first chapter which tells the story of Vanessa's arrival. Her mom is introduced as Mrs Adler, her father is introduced (if you can call it that) as "her father", and soon they're gone. That tales care of the first criterion for YA supernatural trope!

One interesting snippet that sneaks in is that Vanessa is tall like her dad, but this begs the question: tall and in ballet? Anastasia Volochkova can probably relate to that: she has not only actually danced in The Firebird, she has been fired - for heinous crime of being 169cm (5'7") tall, and weighing 50kg (110lbs)! This is yet another example of the brutal standards we set for women, and it's all-too-often criminally different than it is for men. Do men have to wear tutus? Do they have to obsess about weight and height? Do they have to be tossed around like rag dolls? Quite the contrary: ballerinos like Carlos Acosta (who is over six feet tall), and Benjamin Millepied (who is five-ten) seem to have no problem: I don't hear that they were kicked out for being too large.

I guess it's not too much of a stretch to figure out from this that I am not an aficionado of ballet, nor much of a dancing or musical fan in general for that matter. I do like a good story about such artists, however, as other reviews in this blog, such as In Mozart's Shadow, Dramarama, and Sister Mischief will demonstrate. Not that In Mozart's Shadow scored too well, but the other two did.

My first big problem with this novel was when the male lead grand plié'd his way directly into center stage. His name is Zeppelin Gray. I am not making this up; Yelena Black is! The hypocritical part of this is that we're told that he's "too tall to be a dancer" - but tall Vanessa isn’t!? IMO height has nothing to do with it, nor should it, so why mention it? We learn, inevitably, that his body is a chiseled sculpture which leaves Vanessa's lips trembling! Which lips this refers to isn't specified, so I guess Black doesn't have even Carey's embarrassed bravado in this regard, but at least Vanessa's lips aren't "heart-shaped" unlike the lips of another character in this novel. Shortly after this we meet bad boy Justin, the third apex of this infernal triangle, he of the delineated muscles and inevitable hair-in-face. I'm so nauseated by this Trope-l'œil that I wanted to toss this novel on the fire of the firebird at that point

Vanessa learns that the ballet the school will perform this year, quite coincidentally (not!) is Жарптица better known in the west as The Firebird, written by Igor Stravinsky, and curiously the story of a guy who wins a princess, the love of his life, helped by the firebird he's captured in exchange for letting L'Oiseau de Feu go free. The Firebird was Stravinsky's first project for the Ballet Russes, written when he was an unknown.

My prediction by then was easy: we know that Zeppelin will be playing the male lead in the ballet, Vanessa will be picked for the female lead (red hair - firebird, get it?!) and this will create huge resentment amongst her fellow ballerinas, the greatest nemesis of which is undoubtedly Zep's girlfriend, Anna Franko, evidently the progeny of a startling line of prima donnas, but there's far more to it than this. Vanessa's sister Margaret was picked to play the firebird rôle and she disappeared. My WAG was that Margaret quite literally became the firebird and that's how she disappeared. Consequently, the only way in which Vanessa will find out what happened to her sister is if she inhabits the same rôle herself.

This novel does have a few amusing quirks. These people are all fit young ballerinas/os in training, and yet they ride the elevator up to their floor?! The more senior students force the freshmen/women into a rather scary and then rather sick initiation, but this is nothing compared with the Nazi-like ballet classes. We do learn, from one of these, however, that Vanessa gets truly in the zone during a pirouette exercise in one of her classes. This is what sets her up for a freshman entirely predictably taking the female lead in the school's production of The Firebird.

Of course, there's always room for gross error in my predictions, but it seemed obvious that Zeppelin would really be the bad guy, that Justin is going to win fair Vanessa's hand, that Justin is there because he was Margaret's boyfriend, and that he's back for the same reason Vanessa is: to find out what happened to Margaret. This would explain his long absence from the school, and the reason he's now forced to take classes with the freshmen. But Vanessa thinks he's evil, and she goes on a date with Zep, of course. Next in tropeville comes the appallingly clunky but tropely inevitable instance of them being quite literally thrown together. This happens on a subway when the train takes a curve, and Vanessa, supposedly a brilliant ballerina, can’t keep her balance? Honestly? The plot sickens.

Zep takes her to a pizza place in the Village, and "The warmth of his fingers closing around hers made her legs go weak." Oh, and let it not be forgotten that she "melts" beneath his touch. Barf. Okay so the comment Zep makes regarding soda while they’re eating the pizza is really funny, but that was the only interesting thing about him in the entire novel. And how can we have a female lead who is so unheroic? How can we respect an invertebrate girl like Vanessa? Why do female authors so consistently trash their female main characters in this way? Does Black hate young girls, or just Vanessa? Does she have so little respect for her that she creates this girl in this way?

On page 145, Black has Vanessa saying to Zeppelin, "So now that you have me alone, what do you want to do with me? This is such an echo of Kitai's line to Tavi in Jim Butcher's Academ's Fury:

"Well," she murmured after another moment. "You have me, Aleran. Either do something with me or let me up." (p296)

I had to wonder if she had read that novel, but it's a pathetic echo compared with that entire scene in Butcher's novel. You can find the page in Google Books here.

Zep tells Vanessa that she's different from all the other girls he's taken out. What, the others had two heads? Six legs? No arms? I'm sorry but this is thoroughly flatulent. Zep is quite obviously an imbecile who ultimately treats her like dirt, and Vanessa is equally an imbecile if she swallows all this crap he's telling her, especially when he tells her that most girls wouldn’t be OK with going out for pizza? What planet is Black from? Every girl of the same personified Jell-O® hue as is Vanessa with him, would crawl through sewerage for the trope guy. I call bullshit on this whole thing. Through a megaphone. But guess what, Justin is no better. In fact, he's worse because he's supposed to be the good guy yet he flatly refuses to tell Vanessa-Sue a single thing that will help her. He's reduced to absurdly cryptic hints throughout the entire novel. What a complete and utter time-wasting loser.

This trope triangle was one of two real problems with this novel and it's not even the most important one. As I mentioned, the basic plot is great, but the biggest problem is how the story is being told. It started out as a story about Margaret Adler going missing, and Vanessa Adler's plan to try to discover the truth about her sister's disappearance, but it rapidly dissolved into a sad, boring love-triangle with two farcically cardboard guys, and a wet rag of a girl, and who cares about missing Margaret? For that matter, who cares about the dance when we can obsess on Zeppelin, the most worthless character ever created in the history of worthless characters?! I got this book because I was misled into believing it was about dancing, and about overcoming obstacles, and about the mystery, and I warmed to it when I thought there was a supernatural element being added to the mixture, but I've really been let down. I did read to the end of this novel, but I skimmed it for the last hundred pages, only truly stopping to read when it got interesting, which unfortunately wasn't often enough!

And what's with Messiah Anna Franko and her twelve princesses? They follow her around like ducklings, and it's truly pathetic. At least there is some sort of explanation put up for this, but I found it inadequate to explain all of their behavior all of the time. I cannot honestly believe that not a single one of them would harbor any regard for Vanessa and her skill. This was such a heavy-handed high-school cliché that it was to pathetic to tolerate and it was entirely without merit. Yes, I don't doubt that dancers, like anyone, can be childish and peevish at times. I don't doubt they have flaws. I do seriously doubt that they would all behave en bloc like this. This story had it within itself to be so much better.

Here's a word about the novel you write being inescapably yours: no matter how many beta readers you have, no matter who your editor is, it's all on you, and you need to factor that by a magnitude of ten if you self-publish. If we don't take this responsibility, we get lines like this on p296: "Joseph lashed at out at Zep...". No spell-checker is going to get that. Microsoft's sad sack of a grammar checker will not catch that. No last minute skim-read is going to find an error like that. It's all on you, the author.

Having said that this novel becomes less and less about the dance, to be fair I have to add that at least Black didn't completely forget that "It's the dance, stupid!". Most of the action, when it's not "Oh Zeppelin, where-the-hell art thou, Zeppelin?" is about a dance that Black invented for this novel: la danse du feu - 'the dance of fire' which is supposed to be a particularly difficult routine, but it's not part of The Firebird. Don't confuse this with the Infernal Dance as I initially did. Black's invention was added purely for the supernatural portion of this tale. As you can see, it sure doesn't look like this ballerina is having any trouble, nor this one with the actual firebird ballet! Note that I am not a ballerino, nor a musician, so this is only my amateur opinion, and this certainly isn't to belittle those who perform (either the music, or the dance, in) these pieces. None of it is "so easy anyone could do it".

On a lighter note, don't confuse feu with fou! There's this old joke about a guy who is learning French and he's staying in a cabin one cold night with a couple of acquaintances. One of them has to leave for a time, and she tells the man not to let the fire go out, but he thinks she said "Don't let the fool go out" and spends his time watching the other guy and ignoring the sputtering fire! But I digress!

So, once again when Zep abandons her, Vanessa goes to practice in the room where there is ash on the walls outlining the pale shapes of ballerinas in various poses from the dance of fire. Vanessa copies these poses one after another, and she sees the shapes come alive and start dancing with her. In time, they slowly disappear except for one, which she assumes is Margaret, and which continues to dance with her until Vanessa collapses. She finds herself, wilting willow that she is, carried back to the NYBA building by Zep, and she tells him what happened, but then get this: when she considers telling him her suspicions about ballerinas disappearing, she baulks at that in case he would think she's crazy! So telling him about live, dancing, wall shapes - absolutely fine; telling him about demonstrable ballerina disappearances - absolutely crazy. Okay! Got it!

I won't go into any more in order not to completely spoil it for anyone who is interested in reading this, but the ending is simply not good enough and is merely the introduction to volume two in what is destined, apparently, to be a series. If Black had ditched the instadore, that alone might have persuaded me to relent on the tedium and lack of dancing detail and perhaps rate this as a worthy read, but as it is, it's never going to get there for me. Definitely a warty read.

Angel by Nicole Marrow and Laura Hayden

Rating: WORTHY!

I breezed through the first third of this with no effort which I took as a very positive sign! The writing is really good, and my fear that this was going to enter into a sickly embrace with instadore or paranormal trope was swept away leaving no stain on my consciousness. I still didn’t know at that point what was going on with the female protagonist, Angela, but I was on board!

It could have been a novel about an angel, exactly as its title suggests, which would be a big, fat red ink mark in this book's ledger, but it's also:

1. Not written in the first person present tense
2. Not a sad YA romance novel
3. Not a bearer of a prologue
4. Not written badly
5. Amusing
6. and supplied with at least three interesting characters

These are all big fat black ink marks in the ledger, so I'm really quite comfortable - moreso than I feared I would be when I saw this on the library shelf. Believe it or not, I was attracted by the color to begin with - a rich shiny orange which made it stand out from other books; it looked good enough to eat or drink! The title was a bit of a repulsive force-field, but after I read the blurb I was definitely interested, and after I read the first couple of pages, I decided that the writing made it worth a read, so it was not the problem I’d initially visualized.

That's not to say the writing is perfect; there's a handful of screw-ups, such as one p296: "Before Dante could Angela's denial..." which only goes to show that even an expensive production with a professional editor can fail and not end up as good a hob as a conscientious self-publisher can do., but here's the secret: if you write badly and tell and interesting story, you can get a lot further with me than if you write perfect prose, yet tell a crappy story! Marrow and Hayden do neither - they tread very well between those extremes, writing very well for the most part and telling a really engrossing (if somewhat oddball!) story.

I don’t know squat about either Marrow or Hayden, so I can’t say what the deal is with the process that put this novel together. I'm guessing that maybe Marrow had this idea for a novel and Hayden came on board to lend an experienced hand with the writing. Or maybe they're friends and cooked it up together. Whatever the deal is, it works well. Marrow is married to the rapper Ice-T and has been for some time (his real last name is Marrow). According to wikipedia, her nickname 'Coco' derives from her younger sister's inability to say the name 'Nicole' when they were kids! So it's not derived from the song by The Sweet, which they released well before they became big glam-rock stars in England with a string of hits.!

But I digress! The story starts on an airplane where a passenger wakes up and realizes she doesn't know where she is or even who she is. She hardly has time to contemplate this when the plane, which was gliding in for a landing, flips over and breaks up, cartwheeling along the Hudson River in New York City. The only survivors are the woman and the infant she saves from drowning. A news reporter for an online news magazine happens to be on a nearby ferry boat interviewing its captain when the plane crashes and he gets first-hand footage. He also leaps into the water to help this woman and the baby when he sees her swimming and no one else seems to be focusing on her. Later he's instrumental in getting her relocated - when the hospital wants to hastily discharge her - to a psychiatric facility. Her problem is that her memory isn’t coming back.

Her name is determined, by process of elimination, to be Angela, which is very close to the 'Angel of the Hudson' name she'd been dubbed with for saving the baby. Angela seems to have an extraordinarily disturbing effect on men. They seem to vacillate from feeling rather antagonistic towards her, to wanting to jump right into bed with her, no questions asked. A rep from the airline almost seduces her in her hospital room, but he has a heart-attack before anything can happen. Her doctor decides to discharge her as soon as he can because she seems to be a lawsuit waiting to happen, When Dante, the news reporter discovers (from his brother Bryant, who works at the hospital, that she's to be discharged with her memory still not intact, he publishes an article which effectively shames the airline into footing the bill for some extended psychiatric evaluation, to see if her amnesia can't be resolved.

The facility she's sent to is shabby and so it’s value to her as a remedy is highly questionable; clearly the airline hasn’t exactly splurged, but at least it's somewhere to stay! She's roomed with Gretchen, a rather valkeryan woman with serious anger control issues, but Angela, when threatened, uses some Judo move on her, which drops Gretchen to her knees and the two of them become friends after that.

There's one more thing. Angela hears voices which seem quite clearly to be the thoughts of people around her, but she doesn’t get all thoughts all the time. It seems to be a bit like Prince Po in Graceling: - she only seems to get thoughts which are directed specifically at her, although Angela is a bit of a Mary Sue about figuring this out. What transpires is that she finally realizes that it's men she can hear, not women at all, and on one of her daily constitutionals around the grounds, she "overhears" two night-shift orderlies plotting on raping her new roommate (Gretchen is by this point unceremoniously gone, for some reason). In order to defeat the evil orderlies, Angela switches meds on her roommate so she's the one who is out for the count; Angela then switches places with her. I think Marrow and Hayden need to learn a bit more about how medical facilities dispense medications and the power of what inappropriate dosages can do, but they've already established this place as sloppy at best, so I'm willing to let this one slide!

The two men come into her room at midnight and she's suddenly overcome by a desire to have sex with them, but then her previous plan breaks through her delirium, and she beats up on them instead. The next morning she "hears" one of them plotting revenge against, her so she checks herself out of the institution and calls Dante, using the number on the business card he left in her clothing when she was at the hospital. They meet at a diner (although on p170, Marrow mistakenly refers to it as a dinner!) in a bad part of New York City. I've been waiting for these two to get together, so let's see what happens now! I'm in a mood for blitzing this novel and getting it read today. That will also facilitate my starting on something new, which has become more imperative since it has relevance to a news item that's been on the airwaves over the last couple of days.

In the diner, they eat surprisingly tasty food, and Angela shares everything with Dante, including passing him a picture which she has drawn of the man who keeps on appearing in her nightmares - the man who killed her. Dante thinks she may be crazy - but she doesn't know this since he's the first man she cannot "hear". Despite his fear that he's as crazy as she is, he decides to help her. He starts by trying to get together a list of women from the local area who were murdered, and he narrows it down to a list of six he intends to investigate. Angela picks out a specific one: Chloe Mason and without seeing the photograph, identifies the perp, her husband Lars. Curiously, the drawing she did is never mentioned nor is it compared with the photograph. This appears to be an oversight on the part of the authors.

One evening very shortly thereafter, when Dante and Angela are in his cube discussing how to proceed, Dante's miserable boss Victor comes out. Angela hides and Dante talks with him briefly, but just when he thinks Victor is going to leave him in peace, Angela comes out of her hiding place and strikes up a conversation with him. It's during this and the events surrounding it that Dante discovers, as does Angela, that she can change her physical form, so she's not only reacting behaviorally towards fulfilling men's fantasies, she's now reacting physically and actually changing her appearance to match what they desire.

The reason she has done this in this case is that she caught Victor's thoughts - he only came to Dante's cube to plant some evidence which would destroy Dante's career and simultaneously free Victor from suspicion. Victor has been embezzling money from the news organization and was planning on disappearing to Brasil. Angela's transformation and mind-reading bring down Victor and get Dante a promotion: he now runs the news department and he hires Angela to work with him. When he and she are going through the resumes for the people he's considering hiring, Angela remarks that they're all women! Dante does indeed staff up his extraordinarily genderist news department with all female staff.

Three of these, Selma, Althea, and Ivy, are brought into Dante and Angela's confidence about what they're up to. The four of them go after Lars Mason under the pretense of giving him a freebie web spot advertising his sale of his magnificent mansion in the guise of an interview with this successful financier. He claims he's selling the house because it holds too many memories of his wife. Needless to say they bring him down, and that's how this story ends. But while there's no prologue, there is an epilogue which has Dante and Angela jetting off to LA to pursue what Angela was doing out there for two days before she flew back to NYC, became possessed by Chloe, and got into that crash. Clearly this novel was intended as the start of a series, and I have to say that I'd be up for reading a sequel, especially since we still don't know what Angela is or what happened when Chloe died and her "spirit" seemed to fly up and possess Angela's body right as her plane flew over the very place where Chloe was murdered.

Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa by Benjamin Constable

Title: Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa
Author: Benjamin Constable
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I must be fated to start out not liking ebooks as I begin them, liking them as I dig deeper, and then unpredictably either liking them or hating them as I read through to the end! Strange but true. Constable may be a famous last name in English art, but that still didn’t make me want to read any introductions, prefaces, prologues or forewords written by this particular Constable. As I've said before, if it’s worth reading, it’s worth putting into chapter one, which was where I started reading. That's also where I had a problem enjoying it.

Note that the male protagonist in this novel is Benjamin Constable. Why he chose to depict himself - or perhaps more accurately, use his own name for the character - or indeed whether Constable is a real person or merely a pen name for someone, perhaps even a female author, I have no idea at this time. To distinguish between Constable the character and Constable the author, I shall refer to the character as BC, and the author as Constable from this point onwards.

The first thing we get to read is a suicide letter, which normally ought to make a reader perk up and pay attention, but I found myself so distracted by the rather pretentious and overly florid language of the meandering letter that I really started not to care if this person had died! In the end, I felt rather cruelly comforted by her absence from this world, if it meant that she had taken this kind of fluff with her when she left! Fortunately for Constable, the story began to pick up after that, and I found that I’d read some hundred and fifty pages effortlessly, without feeling any awful thoughts towards Constable or towards his female protagonist. The purportedly dead one of his two female protagonists, that is....

The assumption is that she's dead, but I am not convinced. Indeed, given his penchant for not only seeing, but also interacting with a large but non-existent cat, I have to even question whether Tomomi Ishikawa exists at all, much elss whether she did exist and is now dead by her own hand. There is no body, and there is some suggestion that she might still be alive - which even BC himself considers as a possibility eventually! I found myself really starting to like Tomomi Ishikawa even though, as I was to discover, she had some really unlikable traits. Having said this, I have to add, in the end, that I really disliked her! I have a soft spot for Japanese women, so that took some doing! So sue me! Or is it: see Sumo?!

The author of the suicide note had written it on her laptop, printed it out, put it into an envelope, and pushed it under BC's door while he was at work one Friday. Yes, he's quite literally telling this fable about himself - and it’s in the first person! Yes, I know I swore off first-person stories, but I had this one on my e-shelf long before I made that semi-serious declaration. Constable's first person isn’t obnoxious, although he does seem to slip between present and past tenses unpredictably. But maybe this will turn out to be the very first person novel that I've been looking for, as an antidote to the dotes I've been nauseated by of late! We'll see!

BC's ostensibly dead friend is the Tomomi Ishikawa (TI) of the title. The novel is in three parts, one for each of her lives presumably, and the first of these is in Paris, where BC works as an English teacher. Having read the disturbing note, he heads over to her apartment and retrieves her computer, which she evidently intended him to have (since his own is a crappy piece of trash which dies on him soon thereafter). I'm going to blithely assume that his was a nasty old Windows machine and hers is a cool-looking Mac, because I can! There's a complete absence of evidence to the contrary! When he boots it up, he discovers that most of its content has apparently been deleted (and he evidently doesn't know - or doesn’t care - that it’s possible to undelete files if the computer hasn't been wiped with military efficiency). There are several folders apparently left there specifically for his eyes.

At first, these files make no sense (there's a folder titled 'My Dead' which includes his name, for example) along with a handful of others. Some folders contain seemingly random photographs taken all across Paris, others feature entertaining stories (with one or two somewhat boring ones). A couple of the stories relate that TI has killed at least two guys: guys who were evidently suicidal anyway, but this nonetheless makes her at best a Jack Kevorkian-like facilitator and at worst, a murderer. But are the stories true, or are they merely fiction?

BC slowly discovers that TI has left for him a kind of treasure map, whereby if he follows her slightly cryptic clues, which for him are not so cryptic since he knows both TI and Paris so well, he can uncover "treasure" in the form of notebooks or other items (such as, for example, an umbrella) left for him in various hidden locales, secreted in landmarks or hidden in places he and she knew together. These treasures provide further clues which lead him on a journey.

One journey he discovers that he's too chicken to undertake, is to follow a clue which would necessitate him sneaking down into the Paris Metro (subway, underground) tunnels. I thought that this maybe significiant for the novel's finale - and it is! Eventually these clues take him from Paris to Manhattan, where he meets the second female protagonist who accompanies him on his treasure hunt. Her name, curiously, is Beatrice! Curious that is, for me, since I'm currently immersed in writing a parody of Divergent! Yet another weird coincidence in my reading-writing adventures! Maybe I should write a novel à la Constable about those?!

At each place where I had to stop reading this, I found myself looking-forward to resuming it, which is always a good feeling for a reader. This story is a bit like a Dan Brown novel, but with a real story in place of the trade-marked high-speed Brownian motion. And this is enough spoilers for a new novel, so the rest of this review will be much mroe vague observations, not detailed descriptions, and the first of these is that Constable really has a charming way with his characters (the suicide note notwithstanding!). Their interactions (even with TI who can be obnoxious to him at times in his reminscences), and especially with Beatrice, are whimsical and endearing. There is a sly sense of humor running through their conversations which I very much appreciate.

His initial encounter and budding relationship with Beatrice at the New York Public Library and afterwards is completely captivating. I was impressed by the maturity and playfulness of the friendship, with both BC and Beatrice contributing equally to the bond which they created between them, and this is exactly how it should be in my mind. What a pleasure it is to read something of this quality after having dealt with some truly dreadful relationships in YA novels of late! It’s like comparing a blue ribbon mousse with several day-old, rubbery, chewy Jello which is of a flavor you didn’t even like to begin with.

The relationship doesn't come as a gilt-edged security however, because Beatrice is uncomfortable with all the coincidences which seem to be popping up, and rather leery of his treasure hunt. However this doesn’t appear to prevent their relationship from continuing to blossom. BC - who evidently hails from the Midlands (of England), just as I do - also begins to feel uncomfortable, but not with Beatrice. His discomfort comes from the fact that he's still receiving emails from TI forwarded to him by a third party (or from TI herself, perhaps). Whoever it is has evidently followed him from France to the US, and is tailoring the emails to his activities. He's being watched!

In the end, I was a bit disappointed in how this story came to a conclusion, even though it was entirely in character with what had happened before. Pretty much all of my theories were wrong - save one! I felt a bit cheated by the ending; however, given the quality of writing, and the characterization of the main protagonists, Ben, Tomomi, and Beatrice, I highly recommend this: it's excellently well-written and quite enchanting.

Blind Date by Frances Fyfield

Title: Blind Date
Author: Frances Fyfield
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: worthy

Frances Fyfield is from my own home county of Derbyshire in England, and this is my own signed hardback copy! How cool is that! How many author's signatures do you have on your Nook screen?! lol!

So, too cool, but if only I could be sure I'll like it! So, a blind date with Blind Date! I have to confess that I found this novel almost impossible to get into for the first thirty or forty pages, then it all started settling down. I’d advise a re-write of those first pages were I Fyfield's editor. At one point she's in first person, then loses that for third person. Very little of what she wrote in those pages made very much sense to me; then it’s like someone else took over and the novel was fine.

The story features Elisabeth, a young woman who got drunk one night and tripped over while walking home, and while she was lying there half asleep, some psycho who had been stalking people prior to this, threw acid onto her. Fortunately, she was laying in such a way that her face was largely protected, but her body was severely burned, her skin even dissolved in several places, and her surgery to correct this hasn't exactly been stealthy. I can empathize with Elisabeth a little, having accidentally knocked scalding hot water onto my back when I was very young, but mine is hardly a scar which stands out in public. It does lend a whole nude meaning to "keep your shirt on" though!

We join Elisabeth staying with her mother in Devon at her boarding house. She hates it there, her only comfort being her 12 year old brother (whom I suspect of being the acid thrower, warped wretch that I am, but there is another potential suspect revealed later, so maybe I am as warped as I claim!). Even though she isn't completely recovered from her trauma, Elisabeth prevails upon her friend Patsy (shades of Absolutely Fabulous!) to return her to London. Patsy is something of a fair-weather friend of Elisabeth's, resenting her neediness now that she's injured.

Back in London, Elisabeth moves back into her bell tower. She lives in the bell tower of an old church, one which is largely disused, so the bells haven't rung in years. She wakes up in the night to discover someone else is staying there - a large, gentle young man who was occupying the place during her absence, doing some work around the church. After her initial fear that he was an intruder, they reconcile their positions and he plans on leaving the very next day. She fails to recall that he is the same guy, Joe, who she saw hanging around during one of her hospital visits in Devon....

In addition to Elisabeth, we’re introduced to a small group of young professional women, of which Patsy is one, Hazel another, and Angela the third. They're in relationship doldrums and decide to join an introductory dating service to find a decent guy for themselves. Angela, who has already signed on for this service, but who keeps this secret from the other two, is supposed to meet with a guy (nicknamed 'Owl' because of his eyeglasses) who also joined the dating service but kept it secret from his three male friends (Joe, Rob, and Michael) who were talking about joining it - at Michael's suggestion!

Angela turns up dead. Patsy gets an invitation from the same dating service. None of these girls talk to each other about what they're up to - except that Patsy does confide in Elisabeth, who, having kicked Joe out, has now started to become friendly with him and is lured out for a bus trip around the sights of London with him.

Meanwhile, the rather weird woman who runs the dating service seems to have an oddball relationship with her rather oddball son. The plot sickens! But this story continues to intrigue me. During the first thirty or forty pages I was really becoming frustrated with it, and when I read bits and pieces of it over the weekend, I was frustrated, but reading it at other times, including at lunchtime today, I was drawn right back into it. The problem I think is that this novel is dense and serious and it doesn't take kindly to being read in dribs and drabs, or when there are interruptions going on around you. But if you sit down with it and treat it with respect, and give it some time, then it will be kind to you! How odd is that? It’s like the novel is the physical real-world manifestation of the fictional female protagonist within. I don’t know if Fyfield deliberately created it like this, but it’s a wonderfully enlightening concept which has really made an impression on me as a writer!

So Patsy survives her encounter with Michael, the son of Cynthia, warped and wefted adult child that he is, and she passes on her knowledge of him to Joe and Elisabeth, who are now becoming much more comfortable with each other, although she's as irascible as ever. In a bygone era, I could imagine a young Katherine Hepburn playing her and playing her well. Michael is carrying a psychic wound from someone who was unkind to him, and I believe that the person who did this to him is none other than Elisabeth herself, who caught him stealing when they were both kids, and reported him - although that alone seems insufficient to warp him as much as he is. So now he's killing women who are unkind to him, which is why Patsy is still alive. It makes me worry about what will happen to Elisabeth if this is what happened. How is she going to handle the guilt-trip that drops on her when she learns that she set this killer in motion? Or am I completely wrong in my assessment? It wouldn't be the first time!Both Joe and Elisabeth go to sign on with Cynthia's match-making agency, but Joe deliberately plays himself as an uncouth character and is thrown out, whereas Elisabeth, who remembers Cynthia from the incident during her childhood, is rushed through the sign-on process and hurried out the door a little more kindly. Now it appears that Michael has his hands on a key to her church tower, so things are slowly coming to a head.

I'm not sure I'm too keen on Joe. He strikes me as being a little bit creepy, but Elisabeth I am in love with, and looking forward to reading how this all pans out. As it looks right now, I'm pretty much expecting there to be a showdown in the tower rather reminiscent of the ending to Hitchcock's Vertigo, but with a bell falling on Michael (assuming he's indeed the villain and not an appallingly stinking red herring!) or something along those lines. We'll see!

Well I finished this and I did get something right! The ending struck me as a bit vague, and Joe's behavior seemed so at odds with how he'd been characterized earlier that it bothered me to a degree, but considering characterization and general writing quality, I recommend this novel because of Elisabeth.

Untraceable by S.R. Johannes

Title: Untraceable
Author: S.R. Johannes
Publisher: Coleman & Stott
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I'm ½-way through this one, which is the first volume in The Nature of Grace series, and I have to say that I'm not very impressed. The premise is a good one, but the execution leaves everything to be desired. There are related novels which I flatly refuse to entertain based on what I've read so far: Unspeakable is either another novel in this world, or it's a very à propos one-word review of Untraceable; Uncontrollable is without question a fair description of the little jerk of a protagonist in Untraceable.

Grace Wells's father has disappeared. He's a park ranger and he's been gone for three months and no one knows what happened to him. Since his radio was found in the river, the assumption is that he drowned, but there's no evidence that anyone has ever scoured the river for him! The police are telling Grace that it's the responsibility of the Park Ranger service, which is about to drop the case. Grace is scouring the woods herself using field-craft that she learned at her father's side, but everything she does is pointless because it's been three months and a few rain storms in the meantime, and any meaningful tracks or trails are long gone.

For a story that's supposed to be centered on a female protagonist, I found it inexplicable that every animal she encounters out in the forest is identified as a 'he'! A cricket, a squirrel, a snake, a rainbow trout (which is slimy by the way, in case we aren't yet girlish enough for you!) are all firmly male with not a suggestion of a female creature in sight. How do these creatures breed out here?! Or are the females of the species staying at home doing the housework? I found that level of genderism appalling in a female-centric novel, and it's an entirely predictable betrayal of the very basis of the novel. Sadly, it's not the only one.

Grace is so pathetically desperate that when she finds a Cheetos bag, she begs the police captain - an old family friend - to dust it for prints because her father ate Cheetos! This says more about how illogical the story is than it does about Grace, however, since she is now effectively telling everyone that her father the Park ranger was a complete slob, who trashed up the very park he was supposed to help maintain! Even if there were his prints on the bag, what would it prove? If this were merely a sign that her therapy isn't cuyting it, that would be one thing, but it turns out that it's not. It's actually a sign that Grace is a stupid, spoiled brat who has no clue as to the meaning of the term 'boundaries' or that of 'decent behavior'. She exhibits increasing stupidity as the story continues, starting with stealing the file on her father from the police captain's office!

On a trip into the forest, we're immediately subjected to the beginnings of a tired, tired, tired cliché of the inevitable young-adult love triangle. There's the standard bad-ass newcomer whom she meets in the forest and with whom she inescapably falls into inescapable instadore, contrasted with the faithful, devoted, good-natured moron whom she abruptly ditched, but who will do anything for her and who consequently, she abuses criminally (I use that word avisedly). Grace is a heartless user, and she deserves no consideration or respect IMO.

She happens to very conveniently overhear two guys talking like they're going bear-hunting out of season, and since we've had it bitch-slapped into our heads that Grace loves bears, she's naturally loaded for bear at hearing this! Pop quiz! So having heard this news about the hunters, Grace now decides that the best thing is to:

1. Alert the rangers and police, OR
   
2. Leave her employer in the lurch by running out on her after-lunch shift, follow these bad guys alone into the deep forest without telling anyone what she's up to, and thereby risk getting herself kidnapped and/or killed?
   

Which do you think she does? You got it right! And what do you think happens? Yep! Got it in one! And who do you think rescues her from these clichéd caricatures of dumb red-neck brutes into whose evil arms she falls so helplessly? Yep, it's the mysterious bad-ass guy in the forest - you got it right again! So now we learn that this young woman for whom we're supposed to root is not only wilting like an unwatered wallflower, but is also stupid squared. She has a cell phone but never once does she call in where she's going or that she might be in trouble with two poachers, or that she's escaped from two poachers and someone from the Ranger's office needs to come pick them up.

At one point, while she and her rescuer (no word yet on whether his hair falls into his eyes, but he does have recognizable muscle mass) are sheltering in a cave from the conveniently pouring rain which our field-crafter never saw coming (or if she did, she sure kept quiet about it), she actually has this thought: "Maybe it can't hurt to give this guy a chance. Drilling him is much better than being grilled about my encounter."! I did not make that up! She would rather drill him than be grilled! I'm sure that's not what the author intended me to imagine, but it is what she achieved!

Nor did I make up this one which appears a bit later: "Just as I'm about to give up, something nibbles at my fly. Breathing evenly, I do a quick jerk..." Yeah, she's talking about fishing, but there are better ways of writing these things, and if your story is in danger of going over a cliff, you definitely don't need to pile on any more baggage with sloppy syntax or idly composed prose that might tip an already precarious balance in your reader's mind! This guy Mo, the bad-ass savior of Grace, has never harmed her or even looked like he would, and now he's actually saved her life, yet she's having more qualms about him than she did about blindly following two nasty guys into the forest by herself! Honestly? Now she gets all cautious?! Maybe Grace is short for graceless?

I'm sorry, but novels like this, if this is all they have to offer, need to be sold with a free barf bag attached. I was hoping that the other half of this story would be a lot better than the first one, but it seems not. Grace is still doing monumentally dumb things. When she gets back to town, she fails to tell the police of the fact that she was held hostage by people whom she actually considers might have something to do with her dad's disappearance! Yeah, just let 'em run wild, graceless! Instead she goes directly home without even a care for whether someone might be following her. When Les the Ranger shows up, she does tell him, and he goes off after the bad guys Al and Billy, telling Grace to wait at home. Pop quiz! So having been told by a Park Ranger to stay home Grace now decides that the best thing is to:

1. Stay home as instructed, OR
   
2. Promptly heads into the forest without telling a sole where you're going?
   

Right again! I think Grace might actually have taken the lead from Luce (of Lauren Kate's abysmal Fallen novel) for being the dumbest cluck in the hen-house. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that the title of this novel refers to Grace's functional neurons.

So predictably, Mo finds her again - what a stalker he must be to always be there when she is! But unlike her behavior with the bad boys Al and Billy, she takes Mo down hard before she realizes who he is. She she can put him down but no one else? Is that the basis of her attraction to him?! Or maybe the basis is the fact that Mo is creepy enough to sneak up on her after all she's been through and not even have the decency to offer a word of greeting on his approach? I skipped an entire chapter at this point because I was in danger of going into a diabetic coma from reading it. The chapters are all titled "Survival Skill #" whatever, and 18 was nothing but Grace flirting cheesily with Mo instead of searching for her dad. I guess she soon dropped that old geezer from her consciousness

"Survival Skill #19" has her unaccountably freaking out over the sound of what might have been gunfire in an area where hunting is regularly going on! Of course it might have been an engine back-firing, but she denies that with a "No way!" when she's ridden her motorbike up there frequently, and she's also followed a truck up there. This makes zero sense. Instead of fearing for the life of Les, whom she sent out here to find those guys, she goes into a panic for herself, and starts running! Mo physically restrains her and demands to know what she's hiding! This is the girl he had to rescue from two deranged guys and he's too stupid to grasp why she might have panicked? She tells him her dad has been missing for "three months, eleven days, twelve hours, and forty three minutes" even though she cannot possibly have it down to the minute or even the hour. No one can.

Brain-dead and graceless fails yet again when Les reveals he has actually brought in Al and Billy. How he managed that when both of them are violent, armed, and have no scruples, is only addressed later and obtusely, but what's a far bigger fail is that all graceless now has to do is accuse them of kidnapping her, and they're in custody for a long time, yet she fails to do so! Instead she goes haring off on some wild-ass chase based on the soda can that Les was drinking from! I want to ditch this novel and move on to something better because I'm now forced to consider that it might be a children's novel and not YA at all.

The only thing actualyl retaining my interest right now is that I'd thought Les would end up getting killed, but since he didn’t, I'm seriously considering that the real villain is Les - or maybe even Mo which would be a pleasant change, but I can't see that happening. So Grace hikes for two hours (wihout telling anyone where she's going, to get to this station based on Les's soda can, and she becomes immediately suspicious when she arrives there, but instead of using her cell phone to call for help, she takes out her knife and lies in wait. This girl is stupid, stupid, stupid, even as she tells herself that this time she needs to be smarter. Snooping around, she finds the station trashed, and a dead bear, hunted illegally, but she does not call it in and she takes zero evidence, not even photos with her phone. Stupid, stupid, stupid. This is definitely a children's story and was therefore pitched to me under false pretenses!

Grace goes back to town and meets with the police captain, but then spends two pages without telling him what the critical problem is, bantering with Wyn instead! When Carl the captain finally drags it out of her that there's a dead bear, he asks her "Are you sure?"! Honestly? Are you kidding me? Maybe it was a dead bee? What could you mistake a dead bear for? Maybe it was an old rug someone tossed out?! But of course since Grace is stupid, stupid, stupid, and incompetent, and didn’t call it in, nor procure evidence, nor take photos, then she has nothing to offer them, and even if she did have evidence, it's not evidence that Al or Billy, or Les had anything to do with it.

Wyn offers to help her but she lies to him, failing to mention Mo. So now Grace is a liar and a jerk, and we’re supposed to root for her? At this point I'm thinking she deserves everything she gets, including a dressing down from Carl for trying to tell him how to do his job. Wyn offers to go the station and get pictures of the dead bear (assuming it was a bear, remember, Grace might have mistaken an old discarded winter coat for a dead bear). Grace immediately forgets how upset and frustrated she is and starts shamelessly flirting with Wyn, which probably accounts for his shameless manhandling of her, with his hands all over her inappropriately and she never raises an objection.

When they arrive at the station, the place is all cleaned up, and the dead bear is gone! Clearly Al and Billy are innocent (at least of the clean-up), but this doesn’t register with Grace, who decides to Google them! She goes out to meet Mo at the river the next day -the hell with continuing her search for her lost father, over which she's been obsessing for months. Who cares about a missing dad when you can squeeze Mister Hottie in the forest with a phishing rod? Naw, it’s much more important to flirt with Mo, who is supposed to be British but uses Americanisms just like a native.

He describes her as a cute girl, and far from being insulted, she shows as little upset from this as she does when he demeans her with 'blossom'. On the contrary, her face heats up and she builds a totally unnecessary fire, apparently just from the heat of her face. When the fire gets going, sparks "twitter" from it! I did not make that up! Twitter! Yep, there's probably a hash tag floating around. Look for #St.iMental.fire. Clearly this is not instadore! This is surely an original Native American Brand True Love™! I mean, get this: "His mouth attack mine with such force that my lips forget to fight back." Yep - demeaning Native American pigeon English! I suppose it’s a typo - that the 's' was missed from the end of 'attacks' but seriously, with the way this scene is going, I wouldn’t at all have been surprised if that sentence had been followed up with something like, "Me Mo. You squaw. Me make heap big love to you in my tipi." So much for the strong female protagonist. Goodbye, graceless, hello Mary Sue! Or maybe we should use a more condescending Native American cliché like 'Dances With Dumbass"?

So Mary Sue goes to Mama Sue for advice on the photos of boot prints she has, and despite not having a single thing by which to judge the size of the prints, Mama Sue nails them down to a size 10 and a size 11. She must be a truly remarkable woman. Mary Sue makes the super-human leap to the astounding conclusion that the smaller boot is Billy's and the larger is Al's. So another day when she could be searching her grid for her dad is blown off to have fun with Mo. How easily she's distracted. Dances With Dumbass make me heap sick. She spends the night with Mo, without calling anyone to let them know where she is. She has a bad dream but eventually she can fall asleep with Mo's arms encircling her in a Mo Original Ring of Safety™. Sigh.

Her mom freaks out when she gets home the next morning and Mary Sue Grace (MSG) offers neither a word of apology nor of explanation. Far from it. She treats her own mother like crap. Her mother complains that she missed her psych session yesterday and MSG declares arrogantly that she will pay for it, since she's a working girl, but guess what? Since at this point, she's not worked throughout this entire novel except for one shift which she blew off at lunchtime, she's hardly working in any meaningful sense, now is she? So her Mom grounds her, but Wyn shows up, and this shameless 16 year old starts kissing him. It must be the power of Wyn telling her that he wants to think for both of them! I am not kidding: that's exactly what he said!

I'm sorry, but I'm outta here. This novel sucks rotten wood like a forest fire. I have better things to read with my time. This is a definite WARTY!